Cardi B One-Ups Offset’s Love of Bling on Her New “Money” Artwork

Migos are so obsessed with jewelry that they invented their own term for their particular brand of iced-out looks, which they call “drippy.” In the pre-Grammys getting-ready video they shot for Vogue earlier this year, Quavo turns his attention to bejeweled jacket. “This is dripping right here, but it ain’t spilling,” he describes. “You ain’t overloading. It’s a lot going on, but not too much.”

The artwork for Cardi B’s new song “Money,” her first new solo single since she released Invasion of Privacy earlier this year, finds her posing in gloves entirely composed of gold watches and a gilded, chain-fringed hat—it’s definitely overloaded, to borrow a Migos turn of phrase.

As her stylist Kollin Carter described over the phone, “Money” is all about Cardi being a boss (at one point, she quips “10 different looks and my looks all kill”) and celebrating financial stability, so Carter wanted Cardi to embody this paean to luxury in the artwork, too. “Growing up, Cardi and I both loved diamonds and gold,” says Carter of their particular vision of extravagance, which they achieved through the over-the-top Christian Cowan watch gloves and a handmade Laurel Dewitt hat, a look that’s quickly becoming Cardi’s signature—she wore the very same shape in her “Be Careful” video and more recently with a Moschino birthday ensemble.

Carter says he and Cardi had always wanted to incorporate the Cowan gloves in her visuals, but they never really found the right moment to do so. The gloves were so heavy—Carter estimates they weigh about 2 to 3 pounds each—that Cardi kept having to rest her arms on one of the props during the photo shoot. While it’s hard to imagine anyone else wearing those gloves IRL, they’re actually quite functional in a sense. “All of the clocks on the gloves work,” Carter says.

Cardi may be one-upping her husband in a sense, but Carter says they had other visual touchstones for the imagery. “We wanted her to look like a lamp straight out of Donatella Versace’s house.” If you listen to the audio on Cardi’s official YouTube channel, you can almost imagine just that—and you can actually watch the jewels glisten, too.